• Mac OS X,  Mac OS X Server

    Upgrade OS X to El Capitan

    Installing OS X has never been easier than in Yosemite. In this article, we’ll look at upgrading a Mac from OS X 10.10 (Yosemite) to OS X 10.11 (El Capitan) to . The first thing you should do is clone your system. The second thing you should do is make sure you have a good backup. The third thing you should do is make sure you can swap back to the clone should you need to do so and that your data will remain functional on the backup. Once you’re sure that you have a fallback plan, let’s get started by downloading OS X El Capitan from the App Store. Once downloaded, you’ll…

  • Articles and Books,  Mac OS X,  Mac OS X Server,  Mac Security,  Mass Deployment

    Yosemite Server Guide/Page Live

    A blog is a great way to communicate information. But pedagogy, yo… Blogs are not great ways to teach in a guided manner. But they can be. So with a little Table of Contents, or a Guide of sorts, you can easily communicate in a fashion similar to a book. And this makes the third annual OS X Server Guide that I’m publishing in this manner; the guides for Mavericks and Mountain Lion are  still available. I doubt I’ll ever actually bother to take them down. I’ve been working on getting the annual guide up for a few weeks and while there are still some posts remaining, but it’s basically done (some articles…

  • iPhone,  Mac OS X,  Mac OS X Server,  Mac Security,  Mass Deployment

    Add Your VPP Token To Profile Manager Running on Yosemite (OS X Server)

    Apple began rolling out new features with the new Volume Purchasing Program (VPP) program last year. There are lots of good things to know, here. First, the old way should still work. You’re not loosing the stuff you already invested in such as Configurator with those codes you might have used last year with supervision. However, you will need an MDM solution (Profile Manager, Casper, Absolute, FileWave, etc) to use the new tools. Also, the new token options are for one to one (1:1) environments. This isn’t for multi-tenant environments. You can only use these codes and options for iOS 7 and OS X 10.9 and 10.10. Also, if you install…

  • Mac OS X,  Mac Security,  Mass Deployment

    Yosemite and The Xsan Command Line

    Let’s start out with what’s actually available in the Server Admin CLI: serveradmin. The serveradmin command, followed by settings, followed by san shows a few pieces of information: bash-3.2# serveradmin settings san
san:computers = _empty_array
san:primaryController = "95C99FB1-80F2-5016-B9C3-BE3916E6E5DC"
san:ownerEmail = "krypted@me.com"
san:sanName = "krypted"
san:desiredSearchPolicy:_array_index:0 = ""
san:serialNumbers = _empty_array
san:dsType = 0
san:ownerName = "Charles Edge"
san:managePrivateNetwork = yes
san:metadataNetwork = "10.0.0.0/24"
san:numberOfFibreChannelPorts = 2
san:role = "CONTROLLER" Here, we see the metadata network, the GUID of the primary (active) MDC, the name of the SAN, an array of serial numbers (if applicable – in a purely Mountain Lion/Mavericks SAN they aren’t), the owner info plugged in earlier and the metadata network interface being used. Next, we’ll take a peak at…

  • Mac OS X,  Mac OS X Server,  Mac Security,  Mass Deployment

    Setting Up An Open Directory Replica In Yosemite Server

    Previously, we looked at setting up an Open Directory Master in OS X Server. An Open Directory Replica keeps a copy of the Open Directory database available for users even when the Master goes offline. But it can also take a part of the load from the Open Directory Master and when using the new Locales feature, balance network traffic. To get started with an Open Directory Replica, first enable SSH, now disabled by default. Next, use the changeip to check the host name. While the Server app is cool, it caches stuff and I’ve seen it let things go threat shouldn’t be let go. Therefore, in order to make…

  • Uncategorized

    Setup NetInstall On OS X Yosemite Running the Server app

    The NetBoot service allows administrators of OS X computers to leverage images hosted on a server to boot computers to a central location and put a new image on them, upgrade them and perform automations based on upgrades and images. Since the very first versions of OS X, the service has been called NetBoot. In the Server app, Apple provides a number of options surrounding the NetInstall service, based on Automator-style actions, now calling the service NetInstall. The first step to configuring the NetInstall service is to decide what you want the service to do. There are three options available in System Image Utility (available under the Tools menu of…

  • Mac OS X

    Licensing The Xcode Command Line Tools

    Tools that leverage the Xcode Command Line Tools might have a problem if you install the tools without agreeing to the license. Here, you can see IntelliJ complaining about just that: To agree to the license agreement, you can use xcrun along with the cc verb: sudo xcrun cc This is an interactive command line environment so in order to script it you’d need to use expect to feed in the correct parameters.

  • Ubuntu,  Unix

    Ubuntu and Firewalling

    Using the firewall in Ubuntu can be as easy or as hard as you want to make it. BSD variants all basically use the ipfw command whereas most of the rest of the *nix world will use netfilter. Netfilter has a number of front ends; the one that comes pre-installed in Ubuntu is ufw, short for ‘uncomplicated firewall’. Ufw is good for basic port management: allow and deny type of stuff. It’s not going to have the divert or throttling options. So let’s look at some basic incantations of ufw (you need to have elevated privileges to do all of this btw). Initial Configuration First you need to enable ufw,…